Limitless: The Idea Of Enhanced Elite
In Limitless, the enhanced elite foreseen by Buchanan already exists. Atwood, the financial tycoon, and eventually Eddie, are part of this exclusive group. Buchanan predicts that the rich will be the first ones to buy access to the cognitive enhancers, making them the “willing guinea pigs” of what could be a defective product. Atwood then becomes the martyr of NZT when he runs out of his supply and falls into ill health, with Eddie saying “but Atwood wouldn't get better. Because Atwood was out of MDT”. There are other subtle hints in the film that the drug is already in high demand and being taken by the rich.
When Eddie hesitates to initially take the drug from Vernon, he says “don’t be ungrateful. You know how much that costs? Eight hundred bucks a pop”. A drug that costs eight hundred dollars per pill is either in extremely high demand or extremely hard to produce. We can assume the former is true because Eddie easily sets up an NZT manufacturing lab with the help of a single scientist. This is consistent with Buchanan’s prediction that the already wealthy elite will buy the first version of the smart pill at a higher price, stating “what if the Bioboost package is so expensive that some otherwise qualified candidates can’t afford it” (Buchanan 104). Rather than try to restrict the supply of a smart drug like NZT, the elite can maintain their control of it by making the drug unaffordable. The application of cognitive enhancement to finance was very apparent in Limitless, as Eddie begins trading stocks soon after using NZT. Eddie quickly rises through the financial world and eventually becomes the right-hand man of Carl Van Loon, a business magnate.
In the market Eddie is identifying key indicators of underperformance in different companies using publicly available data. This is consistent with Buchanan’s description of society as an “economy based on the manipulation of digitalized information” (Buchanan 18). Because Eddie’s advantage relies on his enhanced ability to manipulate, Eddie’s room for profit only goes so far as his enhanced cognition over other traders in the market.
In other words, Eddie only succeeds in the market because he is competing against traders who aren’t cognitively enhanced. As more and more people in the financial world take NZT, Eddie’s insights would become less and less valuable. Consequently, there would be less and less opportunity for intelligence-based arbitrage. Eventually, if enough traders in the market were on NZT, they would all be identifying underperformance at the same time, and stocks would be priced perfectly to reflect this. The result would be a stalemate, with very little room for profit and only marginal differences in intelligence giving one trader any advantage over the other. NZT allows people to see patterns in large amounts of data, enabling them to make accurate predictions of the future. In the sense that human behavior is deterministic with perfect information, all moves can be anticipated by a cognitively enhanced person. In a society where everyone, or even an elite, are on NZT, this could create problems.
When two intelligent computers play checkers against each other, it always results in a draw. In a society with an elite on NZT, the edge it would give the user would rely on others not taking the drug. Pattern recognition when on NZT posits a world where everything is predictable, and the more people on NZT the less predictable it would be. The elite would therefore keep the general population off NZT, or the competitive advantage from taking NZT would diminish. they would do this by making it unaffordable and then segregate the non-users. This is consistent with the hypothetical that Buchanan puts forth, where a job applicant gets favorable selection because he has a “certificate of enhancement” (Buchanan 103) that shows he is on the drug. This restriction would result an extremely powerful and rich elite controlling a strict supply of enhancers not available to the general public. Limitless, however, shows that this tight control is necessary. Eddie’s loan shark, for example, becomes a super criminal on NZT. “Even when an enhancement would make you better off overall, it doesn’t follow that you should undertake it. ” (Buchanan 6). The drug dealer shouldn’t be taking enhancers, so restricting the supply is critical.
A society with an NZT-taking elite would still be a utopia, however, because there would be constant innovation and improvement. This is evident from Eddie’s own story, who brings positive change as a Senator and businessman. In Eddie’s campaign office, Reuben tells him “I think we're looking at a second, overflow event-- there's a wave of donations coming in -- and I don't think they're even going to try a second debate”. This suggests that Eddie, who has never held office before, has advanced some new policies or solutions already that make him an extremely popular politician. In a world where the smartest people are operating at their highest cognitive capacity, innovation would be abundant, technology would be advanced, and all problems would be solved.
As Buchanan states, cognitive enhancers would “produce wealthier societies; higher standards of living. They do this by making knowledge that can be applied to produce more food, better 10 Better than Human shelter, more goods, and more services” (Buchanan 9). Human progression would accelerate, and the welfare of society would improve. The division between the existing elite and the disadvantaged would grow, as predicted by Buchanan, but the end result would be a utopian society ahead of its time.
